COPING

COPING; In a Lonely City, the Sisterhood of the Salon

By FELICIA R. LEE

Published: November 28, 1993

WHEN I walked in the other day, Andrea Frias-Mojica and Josephina Silveri, the hair stylists, were eating their lunch in the little room in the back. Two women of a certain age were under the dryers in the front, thumbing through The Daily News as the radio blared an insistently joyous merengue. I asked Andrea about her baby. She smiled and said in her husky Spanish-accented English that he had a cold but he was O.K. Two weeks ago she had left the shop near tears when word came that he was ill, leaving behind rows of unbeautified heads cooing words of support.

This is Edda's Unisex in Morningside Heights. Outwardly, it is just an Amsterdam Avenue hair salon with a black and white linoleum floor, walls painted green and yellow, a mural of a white-sand beach and rows of felicitous beauty products. Add the women -- and the occasional man -- and it is a New York community, one of those small universes of camaraderie that help make this buzzing city of disharmonious parts begin to make sense.

It is no secret that New York can be a difficult and lonely place to live. Human connections can be made and broken with the speed of an express subway train. So New Yorkers slice up the city, finding their nooks and crannies of belonging. They cherish the consistency and delicious sense of belonging that comes with interacting day after day with the people who weigh their meat at the butcher shop, sort their clothes at the dry cleaners, or fill their coffee cups at the corner delicatessen.

For some of us, the beauty parlor is one of the cornerstones of coping with city life. I plead guilty to feeling serene and cloistered as my scalp is massaged by Andrea or as I sit with my head full of blue and purple rollers under the dryer as hot air whips my neck and helps me forget whatever it is I need to forget. A magazine full of shallow insights into the male psyche or a novel about vampires completes the sojourn.

Around me, the regulars talk, talk, talk: who got a raise, who got dumped by her boyfriend or met a dream man, who is ready to send her kids down South to escape the disjointed violence of the streets just outside the door. It is comforting to know these stories in a city of such stark anonymity.

There is a certain intimacy demanded by the democracy of the dryer. We sit without makeup and in blue jeans or sweat pants, wishing for perfection the way women do, changing what nature provided and sighing over the approximations of our desire for beauty, knowing the power of hair. Mothers bring in their daughters for their first grown-up haircuts, introducing them to the luxury of putting their head in someone else's hands. The fickle, bored, or graying choose new hair colors like children in a candy store, sometimes giving in to improbable shades of yellow and red. All that blow-drying and dyeing and straightening and curling can lead to a casual sharing of life stories.

This is a subtle show, though, a female shorthand that excludes the uninitiated. There is a woman, for example, who had her third miscarriage three months ago. She stopped coming in for a while and when she came back she looked drained and hopeless.

"You O.K.?" is how we check on her, directly. Then there are the indirect ways we keep tabs: Is she keeping her permanent fresh, her ends clipped, her manicure touched up?

Another woman divorced a man who beat her. Her new look signals her new life. She cut her waist-length hair so that her swanlike neck shows, she began wearing big earrings and banished all traces of gray. When she sashays in on Saturday morning, all attitude and pizazz, it is her way of saying that she is back, and we feel good in knowing that although things fall apart, sometimes you can make it out.

Edda's location, at 123d Street and Amsterdam, reflects the city's sometimes uncanny juxtapositions, those collisions of vastly different worlds. Columbia University students, home makers, teen-age girls in oversize clothes and door-knocker earrings, women whose jobs run the gamut sit together in the green leather chairs and thumb through the same worn magazines. The radio blares merengue, women talk trash, and when the door is locked you check out the person with the finger on the buzzer. This, after all, is home for a few hours.

Go 10 blocks north and the world changes. The triumphant dowager buildings of Columbia give way to the squat, joyless projects where poor people live amid the cruising gypsy cabs and discount stores. Some women from this neighborhood are timid, wistful as they ask the proprietor, Edda Rodriguez, how much it will cost to get their hair done. They almost always bring their children, and they shoo them and scold them while leaning into the wash basins.

Some Saturdays, a woman who appears to be homeless and mentally ill wanders in to sell plants. They are poinsettias, some wilting. No one says anything as she rages at the would-be customers, insisting that the customers are sisters who are no different, no better than she. Often, someone will buy a plant out of kindness and, I think, a tacit acknowledgement that life is fragile, we are lucky and nothing is guaranteed.